One of the heroic sled dogs was Balto, whose legendary energy is reminiscent of the canine Buck in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, recently made into a Harrison Ford movie. Recently, a bunch of scientists led by Katherine Moon, a geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, decided to study Balto’s DNA from the dog’s taxidermy remains. Apart from determining that Balto was more genetically diverse than most dogs of today, they also figured out how he looked. It is a marvel of science that a relic of a dead cell can tell so much. Elaine Ostrander, a dog geneticist who was not part of Moon’s study, told Science magazine that Balto’s genes could be a blueprint for promoting healthier dogs today.

Source: The Hindu April 30, 2023 08:06 UTC